Green politics in South Korea – File Not Found

Since I am spending some time in this lovely country I looked into connecting to my environmental activism roots a few days ago and checked out what’s going on with tree huggers in the Chaebol kingdom.

It came as a small surprise that green opposition politics don’t really exist here or are at least gravely underdeveloped for a country with recent annual GDP growth around 5%, dramatically growing energy needs and ever increasing urbanisation – a country that is member of the friendly G20 and that features beautiful nature all around.

There was an attempt to establish a Korean Greens party starting in 2003, which failed in 2008. Right now the party is re-establishing itself, after being terminated yet again following a meagre 0.43% result in general elections earlier this year. It looks like the general public in South Korea has no interest in a green party. Now, why is that?